Wiring, Nets & Buses

Wires are how you connect the holes, rails, and terminals you've already populated with boards and parts into a working circuit. Chip Hippo's wire tool is click-click (no drag-to-draw), every wire remembers the two addresses it connects rather than raw screen positions, and a bus lets you lay a whole marching group of wires — a data or address bus — as one gesture. This page covers the wire tool, colors, cross-board wiring, re-routing and deleting a wire, addresses, and buses.

Wiring a chip to power and an LED

The wire tool

Press W (or click Wire in the toolbar) to arm the wire tool. With the tool armed:

Click a free hole or terminal to anchor the first end — a rubber-band preview then tracks your cursor.
Click a second free point to drop the wire between them.

The tool stays armed after a wire is committed, so you can lay a whole chain of wires without re-arming — each new wire starts fresh, so it does not automatically continue from the last endpoint; just click a new starting hole. A hover ring shows the point under your cursor and turns red the moment it's over an illegal target (already occupied, or the same point you started from) — the rubber band tints red too, so a bad landing is obvious before you click.

Press Esc to cancel a pending (anchored-but-not-yet-dropped) wire without leaving the tool, or Esc/click Wire again to disarm it entirely. M also disarms whichever of the wire, bus, or probe tools is currently armed — one key to "put the tools away." The wire tool (like the bus and placement tools) is unavailable while a simulation is running; editing is locked until you press Stop.

Wire colors

Chip Hippo ships eight wire colors: red, black, blue, green, yellow, orange, white, and purple. The active color is shown as a swatch dot on the toolbar's Wire button — click it to open the color palette, or, while the wire tool is armed, press a digit 1–8 to jump straight to that color (1 = red, 2 = black, and so on through the list above). The color you pick stays pinned between wires — laying a chain of jumpers keeps whatever color you last chose, so pick red for a supply run and black for ground and they'll stay that way until you deliberately switch.

You can also recolor a wire after the fact: right-click it and choose a new color from the context menu (which also offers Remove wire).

Cross-board wires

A wire's endpoints don't care which board or brick they land on — you can run a wire from one breadboard to another, from a board to a PSU terminal, or between two separate strips, exactly as freely as within one board. When you drag a board that a wire is attached to, the wire's other end stays put and the whole wire stretches and re-sags live, riding the move; nothing needs to be re-laid. Deleting a board cascades: any wire with an end seated on that board is removed along with it.

Re-routing & deleting a wire

Grab a wire two different ways:

Its end cap — drag just one endpoint to a new hole or terminal, re-routing that end while the other stays put. A hover ring and red/legal tint on the dragged end work exactly like placing a fresh wire; release over an illegal point and the end snaps back to where it started.
Its body — drag anywhere along the wire itself to translate the whole wire rigidly, keeping its length and orientation and just sliding both ends together onto a new pair of holes. If either landing point isn't free, the wire snaps back on release.

To delete a wire, click it to select it, then press Delete or Backspace (the same shortcut removes whatever's currently selected — a part, a board, or a wire).

Addresses

Wires never store pixel positions — they store addresses, the one cross-module currency for anything wireable. An address is <ownerId>.<point>:

bb1.a12 — a grid hole (board id bb1, hole a12).
bb2.+7 — hole 7 on a rail strip's + rail.
psu1.+ — the + terminal of a PSU brick.

A wire's from/to are just two of these addresses, plus a color. One hole or terminal holds at most one lead — one pin or one wire end — so the occupancy check that keeps the wire tool's hover ring legal/illegal is the same one that governs seating a chip or a discrete. Because everything resolves through addresses rather than coordinates, a wire keeps working correctly no matter how the boards around it get rearranged.

Buses

For a wide, tidy bundle — a data or address bus — press B (or click Bus in the toolbar) to arm the bus tool instead of laying eight wires by hand. It's click-click like the wire tool: anchor a start hole, then click a second point to lay the whole run in one go, rendered as a single fat band rather than a fan of individual wires.

Before you click the second point, set what you're laying:

Name — type a bus name like D[7:0] or A[0:15] in the toolbar; the tool parses the bit range from it. Laying a run onto a chip pin group (a catalog-defined bus of pins, like a chip's data lines) instead fans the bus directly onto those pins in bit order.
Width — while the bus tool is armed, press 1 for an 8-bit bus (D[7:0]) or 2 for a 16-bit bus (D[15:0]), the same two presets the toolbar's width menu offers.

A bus is metadata layered over the individual wires it lays — right-click a placed bus to Rename, Recolor (which recolors every member wire too), Un-bundle (keep the wires, drop the bus grouping), or **Delete bus

wires**. Drag a bus by its band to move every member wire together.